Resilience, courage and kindness, as compassionate points to follow.

This pledge will leave my lifestyle untouched and that of my children as well. They have already received significant sums for their personal use and will receive more in the future. They live comfortable and productive lives.

A strong work ethic and enough wealth not to need it.

Spirit of adventure and kindness.

But the satisfactions of compensation are notoriously fleeting. There is no saving grace in being confined to an iron suit, cold and unforgiving. The pleasures of mental agility are much overstated, inevitably—as it now appears to me—by those not exclusively dependent upon them. Much the same can be said of well-meaning encouragements to find nonphysical compensations for physical inadequacy. That way lies futility. Loss is loss, and nothing is gained by calling it by a nicer name. My nights are intriguing; but I could do without them.

I see the future as something that could come crashing down very fast. Let me put it slightly by way of a comparison. Normal people, and I use the term very deliberately, by this not otherwise able situation - I'm disabled. I'm abnormal. Normal people dont think very much about the medium term future. They think only about the present, which is constantly changing for them or the very far future, which is just an abstraction. For me, its the other way around, my present never changes. So I dont really think about. But the medium term involves my death so I'm quite conscious of what is going to happen to me in about a year, maybe two years, who knows, whereas no one else I know thinks like that.

I was forced to think very hard about what it meant to be me, what it means to be a person who is only a brain. Pascal's 'thinking reed' really does capture it, because I'm just a bunch of dead muscles thinking.

It could really have an impact if I get it right. Something that will get the next generation to see there is a way to think about politics that is not just the way we've been habituated to do it. I care about that and I think I can do it.

I don't believe in an afterlife. I don't believe in a single or multiple godhead. I respect people who do, but I don't believe it myself. But there's a big but which enters in here. I am much more conscious than I ever was, for obvious reasons, of what it will mean to people left behind once I'm dead. It won't mean anything for me. But it will mean a lot to them. ... So in one curious way I've come to believe in the afterlife as a place where I still have moral responsibilities, just as I do in this life except that I can only exercise them before I get there. Once I get there, it'll be too late.

This cockroach-like existence is cumulatively intolerable even though on any given night it is perfectly manageable. “Cockroach” is of course an allusion to Kafka’s Metamorphosis, in which the protagonist wakes up one morning to discover that he has been transformed into an insect. The point of the story is as much the responses and incomprehension of his family as it is the account of his own sensations, and it is hard to resist the thought that even the best-meaning and most generously thoughtful friend or relative cannot hope to understand the sense of isolation and imprisonment that this disease imposes upon its victims.